WASDeTT's Aim and Topics

The motivation for this workshop series is the observation that tools and tool building play an important role in applied computer science research. The tangible results of research projects are often embodied in a tool. Even though tool building is a popular technique to validate research (e.g., proof-of-concept prototyping followed by user studies), it is neither simple nor cheap to accomplish.

Given the importance of tool building and the significant cost associated with it, we initiated this workshop to enable interested researchers to share their tool building experiences and to explore how tools can be build more effectively and efficiently. Thus, this workshop is NOT about the finished product -- a tool's novel features and algorithms -- but about HOW the tool was designed and built.

Topics of interest for this workshop include, but are not limited to:

Should tool building remain a craft?

Should research prototypes be of commercial quality?

How to integrate and combine independently developed tools?

What are the positive lessons learned in building tools?

What are the (recurring) pitfalls in tool building?

What are the good practices and techniques?

Are there architectures and patterns for tool building?

How to compare or benchmark tools?

This Workshop's Theme and Target Audience

The purpose of this workshop is to bring researcher together -- from both industry and academia -- that are experts in the building of tools in

software maintenance

software visualization

reengineering and reverse engineering tools

with the aim to share experiences and lessons learned about the construction of such tools. Thus, talks in this workshop communicate concrete experiences that the speakers have gained while developing their own tool(s). Furthermore, participants have opportunities to participate in the discussion after talks, during the open panel, and in the breakout session.

This workshop especially focuses on experiences of participants that relate to

tool building in industry: Generally, discussion centers around tool building issues that address the interactions between academia and industry; for instance, case studies of (former) research tools that are now developed and/or used in an industrial context. Related discussion topics are: How to elicit tool requirements from industrial participants? How does research with an industrial partner change (and constrain) the building of tools? How to transition a research tool into a commercial offering?

component-based tool building: Increasingly, researchers are leveraging components to assemble their tools instead of building them from scratch. Examples of components are off-the-shelf products (commercial as well as open source) such as Eclipse, Rational Rose, Emacs, Visio, Graphviz, Source Navigator and GCC. In this context, tool-building case studies are of interest that have leveraged one or several components. Related discussion topics are: How to assess and select suitable components? How to customize a certain component (via its API or scripting)? How to interoperate with a certain component?

tool building in teams: Often tools are developed by a single researcher over a few years as part of his or her thesis or dissertation. These tools are typically prototypes that are abandoned after the degree is completed. In contrast, there are also tools that are developed and maintained over many years by a significant team of developers. In this context, the workshop discusses how team size and team diversity impacts tool building, and how to manage larger teams. Especially, is there a need to introduce more formality in the tool-development process? And how can this be achieved without stifling creativity in research?

Other topics besides the ones mentioned above are of interest as well. For example, design and implementation of fact extractors, repositories, and visualizers; non-functional tool requirements (e.g., scalability, usability, and adoptability); and conducting empirical studies and user studies.